1. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to numeric formatting software internationalization. More particularly, the invention relates to a method for generating positive integer number in Chinese number system used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages.
2. Description of the Prior Art
One of the important areas of software internationalization is the translation of numeric values to their textual representation. As described in Richard Gillam's article, spelling out numeric values in words can be useful in many aspects. For example, spelled-out numbers values are used on checks and wire-transfer directives because they are harder to counterfeit. In text-to-speech and speech recognition systems, numbers may also need to be spelled out.
Richard Gillam proposed a rule-based approach to solve a more general problem. According to his approach, a list of rules is set up to describe the procedure of number spell-out. Each rule handles a special case of number spell-out by either directly spelling out of a value or by defining a recursive algorithm.
A list of rules is also set up for Generating Chinese character representation of a positive integer value. However, the presented approach does not generate correct number of zero digits between non-zero digits.
What is desired is to develop a method that correctly generates the corresponding Chinese character representation for all positive integer numbers.